The British held elections last week, and the right won. This will surely result in a great deal of handwringing by the institutional leaders of our Democratic Party. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s leftist Labour party, dragged his supporters relentlessly into the future — evincing a more consistent and robust left socialism on both economic matters and anti-imperial foreign policy than even Sen. Bernie Sanders; his party only captured 32 percent of the vote. Democrats, who exist in a state of perpetual anticipatory defeat, will likely take this as a sign that socialism and real leftism are incompatible with electoral victories.
They may be partially right, though not for the reasons they imagine. Socialism may not be able to vote itself into power; the idea that it might triumph through elections may be its final, enduring liberal delusion. But whatever the case may be, Corbyn was done in by by the singular, inescapable issue of Brexit, pointing to an inescapable tension at the heart of the left-liberal coalition parties that once dominated national politics in the English-speaking world. How do you reconcile contemporary liberalism — urban, professional, and thriving economically in the gentrified neighborhoods of booming, internationally oriented cities — with a socialist left that represents the disaffected working class, service workers, the growing ranks of the economic precariat, toiling away in the so-called gig economy or working what the British call “zero-hour contracts?”
And how do you maintain a durable political coalition between an increasingly conservative liberalism, which is defensive of institutions and norms and both outraged and terrified by the demolition-man tendencies of the popular, nationalist right, and a socialist left that abhors the right’s political and cultural goals but admires its energy, its long-term commitments to political organizing, and its willingness to buck tradition and decorum in pursuit of radical goals?
As Labour’s leader, Corbyn fruitlessly tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one. It often felt like Labour was complaining that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the conservatives were doing a bad job at something that no one really wanted, an uninspiring sort of procedural, technical criticism that failed to inspire either the dedicated opponents of Brexit — the educated, well-to-do, largely London-based liberal professional classes — or what remains of the organized working class, who were in any case far more inclined to support Brexit on cultural and nationalistic grounds to begin with.
It could not help that the so-called Remain faction frequently seemed to defend European Union membership in precisely the stark, neoliberal terms that alienated working people to begin with: open borders and the free movement of people defended not in the language of human rights and dignity, but as a kind of convenient form of labor arbitrage — all ethnic restaurants and cheaper service workers — with the occasional nod toward the ease of continental vacations.
How do you maintain a durable political coalition between an increasingly conservative liberalism and a socialist left?
Nor does it help that the socialist left — at least in its attempts to act in the realm of electoral politics — has largely abrogated any real language of leftist internationalism, ceding the rhetoric of transnational alliances and international institutions to the liberal class at the core of Remain. These are people who speak the language of entrepreneurialism and opportunity, people whose lives as administrators, lawyers, professionals are often made at the interstices of the very bureaucracies that Brexiters resented as opaque, impenetrable, and non-representative.
Their interests are in tension with the interests of Labour and lacking any broad language of international solidarity against the enforced, neoliberal austerity politics of the EU, the party finally did not and could not win against the simpler promise to “get Brexit done,” to press the eject button and get out of the neoliberal alliance, even though the British conservatives will immediately set about enforcing an even harsher program of austerity and social cuts than any required by the dreaded Europeans.
It’s the job of lazy pundits to draw schematic parallels between British elections and the forthcoming American ones; the contexts are too different to draw easy conclusions. But this tension at the core of the Labour Party alliance is a tension that obviously exists within the Democratic Party, even if it is expressed around a somewhat different set of issues. In electoral terms, this is not so much a question of defections — the famous Obama voters who flipped to Trump, or that mythical creature, the “Reagan Democrat” — but rather a question of enthusiasm, of moving the non-voter or the occasional voter to engage in “the political process.” And those constituents, who in America make up a larger population than the active supporters of either major party, are going to need more than a bloody half of a hastily split baby to convince them that this politics bullshit has something to offer them.
Labour’s defeat is a warning about the dangers of electoralism.
Here is where the British elections do present a warning to Democrats and to the energetic but still quite small American left. Corbyn’s inability to take a clear position on the central issue in British politics in a doomed effort to compromise on a question that most citizens viewed as a yes-no proposition resulted in a hopeless muddle, and if opinion polls are to be believed at all, many of Labour’s traditional working-class supporters were willing to temporize on other important issues, such as the National Health Service, an issue on which they correctly view the Tories with suspicion, in order to... well, once again, Johnson’s phrase is the right one: “get Brexit done.”
In this, Labour’s defeat is not just a warning about the dangers of failing to take a stand on a critical national political crisis in an election year, but about the dangers of electoralism itself, about building a movement around casting a vote every few years. Many leftists in America as well as the UK saw Corbyn — a saintly figure of real moral rigor — as something approaching a savior figure, and I am sure many of us (I was not immune from the temptation, by any means) imagined “Jezza” and Uncle Bernie sharing a rumpled embrace on the world stage, the moment at which the rising tide of rightwing nationalism hit its high water mark and began, finally, to recede.
But a real left politics cannot simply wait around for the right candidate, and it ought not engage in the common liberal fantasy that national elections are a sort of on-off switch to toggle between right and wrong, good and bad on a national scale every few years. Socialism requires more than just a vote, because individual elections are often driven by uncomfortable and unanticipated crises, emergencies, and passions. Political solidarity based on common material interests must precede voting; otherwise, an entertaining loudmouth can too easily step in to say, in effect: we won’t give you what you need, but we’ll sure as hell get you what you want.
